When comparing FuelPHP vs Laravel 5, the Slant community recommends Laravel 5 for most people. In the question“What are the best PHP frameworks?”Laravel 5 is ranked 3rd while FuelPHP is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Laravel 5 is:

Laravel comes out of the box with it's own CLI called Artisan. With Artisan developers can do several different tasks such as migrating databases, seeding databases, clearing the cache and much much more.

Pros

Pro

Total flexibility

Fuel has very few restrictions on how to write code. Classes and controllers can be in any file structure, any folder can be the "modules" folder and native classes can be extended any way you want.

Pro

License

FuelPHP is open source and is released under the MIT license.

Pro

Out of the box HMVC structure

FuelPHP follows the HMVC pattern which makes it possible to divide the code into smaller modules.

Pro

Secure

Fuel takes security very serious, and as a result, has implemented the following measures to ensure the safety of your web applications:

Output encoding in views

CSRF protection

XSS filtering

Input filtering

SQL injection

Pro

Powerful yet lightweight ORM

FuelPHP is all about being lightweight and simple, this is also demonstrated by it's built-in ORM, it's simple yet powerful. It maps a model to each table in the database, assigns fields on the table depending on the model configuration.

Pro

Comes with its own CLI

Laravel comes out of the box with it's own CLI called Artisan. With Artisan developers can do several different tasks such as migrating databases, seeding databases, clearing the cache and much much more.

Pro

Comes with an excellent built-in ORM

Laravel's Eloquent ORM is a simple and fast Object-Relational Mapping which helps with organizing the application's database. It supports the most popular databases (MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, etc.) out of the box.

Pro

Good documentation

Laravel's documentation is thorough and very good. It covers everything and is very helpful to experienced and new users alike.

Pro

Easy to write web apps with authentication

Laravel comes with Authentication capabilities and a fully-powered Auth class out of the box. For passwords it uses bcrypt.

Pro

Gives developers a great degree of freedom in how they set up their project structure

Laravel allows for free configuration and does not force developers to use a single project structure, instead they can change it to how they wish.

Pro

Good for building RESTful APIs

With migrations, powerful and intuitive Eloquent CRUD, resource routing, and simple JSON response out of the box, a complete REST API can be written in hours.

Pro

Can use Symfony components

Laravel uses many libraries built for the Symfony PHP framework. Many of these libraries are well-built and have been tested by users before. Since the point of using a web framework is to shorten development time and to avoid reinventing the wheel for problems that have already been solved, then it's logical for a framework to use libraries already built to solve problems that have already been solved.

Pro

Handles event queuing

Laravel supports event queuing and it does so in a very simple way. To create an event that should be queued just run:

This creates a handler that implements the Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldBeQueued interface. Now when this handler is called it will automatically be queued by the event dispatcher.

Pro

Extremely powerful template system

Laravel has a powerful template system called Blade. It's quite similar to Twig or Moustache with lots of curly braces but the real power comes from the usage of PHP code directly in the view. Blade templates compile directly to raw PHP and are processed in the server when a request is made.

Pro

Easy to learn

Pro

Gulp tasks in the form of Laravel Elixir

In Laravel 5.0 they added Laravel Elixir, which provides an API for using Gulp tasks for Laravel applications. Elixir supports several CSS preprocessors and even some test tools. But it's still in the early stages of development and it will be developed even further in the following releases. With more methods and more Gulp tasks supported.

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Cons

Con

Small community

FuelPHP has a pretty small community compared to other alternatives. This means that there are not many resources and guides for it out there, but on the other hand, it's easier to get help from the core team of developers that are working on Fuel.

Con

Bloated

While the speed doesn't seem to be an issue with it (on local tests), in production it may be hindered. The framework creates a ton of files and folders, some of which your app might not even use. Not good if you don't like having a ton of folders and rigid non-standard PHP folder structure for development.

Con

Uses too much magic methods

It complicates debugging and autocompletion.

Con

Hard to use model properties

You need to check all model properties in database to know it exists, or declare all them manually.

Con

Steep learning curve

While a lot of times you can write things in plain PHP, it will hinder you down the line when you want to use core features and find that you have to rewrite code which then causes issues throughout the app. Documentation is good, but you need to know what you are looking for and practical examples are non-existent. Many features have been updated throughout the versions in such a short time that tutorials you find online are confusing to sort through outdated tutorials and guides that no longer work or have been depreciated.

Con

Follows bad design practices

Uses bad practices, like Singletons, Magic models, Middleware.

Con

Poor performance

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